


GENESIS

by Q (ANONiM0USE)



Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series), Teen Titans - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Assassins & Hitmen, BAMF Raven, Beast is an inherited trait, Character Study, Child Neglect, Child Soldiers, Childhood Trauma, Death, Demon Deals, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Dysfunctional Family, Emotionally Neglectful Raven, Emotionally Repressed, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Multi, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Pack Dynamics, Parent-Child Relationship, Sex Pollen, Super Soldier Serum, dick is a dick
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 15:06:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18471433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ANONiM0USE/pseuds/Q
Summary: It all came back to the very beginning-a deal, a death and the ever growing burden of love and what exactly it means to remain in love with people you care for.It was the Genesis of the End.(Teen Titan after series AU/parent!Titan fic)





	GENESIS

* * *

**BAMBI ZURI “BEE” STONE | CODENAME: DEMO**

* * *

 

FALLING OUT OF THE SKY WAS A LITTLE BIT LIKE… EVERYTHING.

 

It was… falling in love with Samson, it was realizing that she’d have to die before they ever had a semblance of a normal life, realizing that with him, she didn’t care about running away, the consequences it’d have, as long as the sky was blue, birds still chirped and she kept falling… it’d be okay.

 

It was… realizing that that little girl that she’d always seen the Witch and Changeling and Astral cry over every time it was his birthday was one and the same as the ghostly pale phantom hunting for their lives, realizing that she’d been holding back when she landed Sarai in the hospital for months and realizing that Astral’s Beast was nothing to her Predator. And the realization that despite all that, she still looked so helpless and lost sometimes that Bee just wanted to hold her for awhile. And that things weren’t ever going to be okay as she watched her silently watch the funeral pyre of the three bodies- Nightwing, Sarali and…her beloved Sparrow.

 

He’d killed all of them.

 

And it really wasn’t OK, dying.

 

It really wasn’t OK that she was about to do it again.

 

The ground was approaching and she wasn’t really sure if she was dreaming or not because she could’ve sworn that she’d heard-

 

“Samson?!”

 

Her lover is frantically trying to activate one of his arrows, any of them, so he can save them.

But she knows where they should’ve been and where they are, so she simply watches him, not even listening to the siren call of magic urging her further into alertness, her heart swelling (or is it her stomach crawling up?) as she feels the ground get closer and his navy blue irises hold her focus and the blue sky screams around them.

 

* * *

**ASTRAL LENARD LOGAN-ROTH | CODENAME: ASTRAL**

* * *

 

HE’S WELL ACQUAINTED WITH IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENINGS.

 

He knows what impossible looks like staring him down, what it looks like when its heartbreak and sorrow, when its tears are silent.

 

He knows how impossible thinks.

 

He knows what impossible feels like as he watches the dead fall around him, twirling out into the clear blue sky.

 

Sara Li, Demo, Sparrow, his little sister…

 

He can feel himself take in a breath.

 

He knows that he’s supposed to be dead--buried in fact, high honors; he’d died in service of his country and whatever they could recover of his body would receive a class 1 burial and he knows that Madrigal wouldn’t have let it be that simple.

 

The Codex of the Cursed. 

 

What had she given up to bring them all back?

 

He wouldn’t let it be vain at least. Not again.

 

Taking in a breath, he weaves his first constellation, the very first one that he’d learned, 

 

“ _ Draco _ ! Wake up, Dragon!”

 

He waits for the familiar crackle of energy with bated breath, releasing it only as the familiar swirl of sapphire lights surround them in midair before the solid body of his dragon forms beneath them, coiling and sliding beneath them.

 

He almost doesn’t notice that Madrigal is still unconscious until her body starts to slide off and she does nothing to catch herself.

 

Gripping her by the arm just in time, he’s struck by how cold she feels.

 

Almost like she’s the one who’s just come back from the dead.

 

She’s got the same type of pale, almost lilac gray skin as their mother (due in part to her hellish upbringing but mostly due to her adapting to her demonic heritage a lot better than their older sibling had) and a great appreciation for the edgier fashion choices of their time. 

 

So he can pretend to attribute the unnatural pallor to her typical appearance and also he hadn’t seen her for a year now. Or it.. Felt like a year? Years? Or could it have been a week?

 

He doesn’t want to ask. He couldn’t bring himself to ask what her upbringing was like, not after that first night filled with emotions rubbed raw and smothered with enforced logic, the way that she’d flinched away as he approached her like a skittish animal, the tears barely there but still visible.

 

He can’t do that to her.

 

Make her say it.

 

The Council did it to her enough, sent her home to the team, her normally vivid evergreen eyes exhausted and dull, lips chewed and she came home a graveyard.

 

Silent as when she’d first arrived into their lives despite her conscious efforts to be seen, to be remembered, to be known.

It hurt to know that once upon a time, she could’ve been just as lively as their father.

And he hated being the one to call attention to these things.

 

He already knew everyone else was just fine with dancing around these things.

 

How they died. Why they died. Who was to blame… He didn’t want to call attention to these things.

 

And he knew Madrigal would wait them all out. 

 

Just like he knew that she’d be just fine.

 

They landed safely and he slowly rose to his feet as Draco disintegrates into starlight and he meets eyes with Sara Li for the first time since he watched her fall out of the sky and towards her death.

 

They’re a familiar ghostly blue and she runs for him faster than he can get his stiff arms to open wide, tackling him to the ground hard enough that he can feel his healing factor work to heal a dislocated shoulder.

 

He takes a moment to relish the moment, breathing in her light, the scent of rain and lavender soothing him until he can’t hide any longer.

 

He gently taps her shoulder, gesturing to Madrigal’s still form on the ground.

 

“There’s something wrong.”

 

He starts getting ready to stand up when ice water fills his veins.

 

Robin--in all his bright red traffic stopping glory, barely much older than they were--enters his vision.

 

Horribly wrong, he amends as the world stutters on its axis.

 

* * *

**“MADRIGAL” ASTORIA MAEVE LOGAN-ROTH | CODENAME [FORMER] : [WRAITH] ORION/PREDATOR**

* * *

 

SHE WENT INTO THINGS A LOT MORE WIDE-EYED AND OPEN-MINDED THAN MOST OF HER COLLEAGUES--DEMONIC OR OTHERWISE.

 

She’d been raised to kill, taught to inflict suffering and born to grief and barely contained bloodlust. She became a hero (why? Because it’d felt  _ necessary  _ , despite all the years of training, she’d never quite been able to stand being alone for long stretches of time. And eventually even her familiars grew tepid) and resisted murder. 

 

She’d never really gotten over the look in their eyes when they discovered how little of the original Astoria was left.

 

She had wisps of lavender threaded between her midnight hair and her human evergreen eyes possessed so much more than a human soul. She was told that when she was first born, she’d had a laugh like happiness and light and she’d shared it often. Now she wasn’t too sure what her sense of humor was and her laugh was short and clipped.

 

Brother Blood taught her to remain silent, patient, he taught her how to be unafraid.

 

It was because of him, she was known as the Devil Eater.

 

Face to face with Trigon, the so-called Destroyer of Worlds, something within her had snapped, taken flight and absolutely relished the fear in his golden yellow eyes. She’d-it, whatever that thing had been- had methodically tortured him, day by day, breaking down his mind until he’d freely offered up his soul.

 

He was her first contract.

 

Did she love him?

 

She hoped not.

She was about to bargain (gamble really) on the fact that there was no way that she could love something like that.

 

She’d just known him… Intimately well.

 

He was her grandfather.

 

She summoned him from time to time, sometimes to relish in how subservient he was now and other times because she needed an explanation for what she’d done in the throes of growing pains.

 

It was already difficult being half-demon, trading more and more of her humanity like bargaining chips was slowly starting to wear on her.

 

And hiding it was starting to grow stale.

 

But she loved her newfound family, all fragile and scared of the truth, all in some way scared of  _ her  _ and so she made sure that they never saw the scars, her true face or felt the skittering spark of anger and bloodlust she carried with her.

 

And oh, oh, had that betrayal _ hurt _ .

 

Watching their mother leave in the middle of the night, her deceptively at peace white cloak flapping in the night, just barely a week after their father had succumbed to his unstable DNA, guilty relief filling her veins for a moment after the cloying scent of Death left the Tower.

 

Meeting her deadened amethysts with her own eyes, her actual eyes, letting her know that she would have to return to an uncomfortable truth if she wished to come back. Knowing that her mother didn’t want to know.

 

She disappeared forever into the black night.

 

And Madrigal hoped that Astoria’s love was enough.

 

Because if not, she didn’t know if Madrigal knew Raven well enough to love her.

 

She filtered through the people she wanted to save, made contingencies for just in cases, and rewrote her terms over and over again.

 

She had to save the people that she loved.

 

(why? Because she loved them)

 

(why? Because she loved him and her and him-)

 

(why? Because… Because… it just feels right.)

 

She  pricks her fingertips, index then middle, savoring the pain as dark garnet blood trickles down her fingertips and she draws her communication sigil, careful not to touch the edges of the pocket mirror, careful not to meet his eyes as he answers her.

 

“Little Devil, you’ve lost everything now.”

 

It’s a statement that she can’t deny. And she doesn’t look up from his skeletal ankles, partially hidden by modern Oxfords and neatly pressed obsidian slacks because she can’t see those images again.

 

She can’t do a lot of things anymore.

 

She can’t bring herself to defend Jump City without her teammates and she’s not inherently good enough to find another reason to stay and help.

 

She can’t bring herself to go back Underground and defend against overzealous, bloodthirsty heroes who attack the outsiders without remorse without Dom. 

 

She… Doesn’t want to go back to the Underworld. Not yet. She’s still got human in her and that’s got to be enough to keep her good.

 

But it’s difficult. All of the humans walking around her with their emotions so bright and warm and with her so hungry-

It was alright when she was a hero.

Eggs cracked, hunger sated, lives ended and lives saved.

 

It was for the greater good, Brother Blood reminded her, as he coughed his life onto her pristine white cloak, the pad of his thumb had trembled as he wiped away a single tear, slumping over as she shoved him off her.

 

It’s for the greater good, Mayjor had told her, his hands clasped around his back as she let him remain secure in the hands pinning her to his dusty carpet, holding back a sneeze as he explained who she was to kill for him.

 

She’s never the greater good.

 

She’s just the best choice amongst evil.

 

But Dominic… Dom, he’d seen her as precious, good, kind, someone to keep him safe, someone to protect and she’d…

 

She’d come back to her senses a week before Astral’s hands were sent to her, he’d been sent on a mission to Slade because she’d stopped answering to the Mayor’s summons.

 

She’d had blood in her mouth and when she caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she’d wept. Bitter and long. Because that was Wraith in her eyes again. And she’d been murdering people.

 

It only got worse when she discovered that Dom wouldn’t even get a gravestone for her to visit.

 

He was just  _ gone _ .

 

Astral was just the last straw.

 

And she regretted promising not to die.

 

Because she was a Contract now  in her own right, no terms and no expiration, and she could not die.

 

Which… Was rather helpful when she put her mind to work.

 

“I want to change the terms of a contract.” 

She could feel Death look down at her, her final shreds of humanity offered up to it, all sorrow and blood and sweat and she waited for itto deny her, her heart steadying as she prepared to stake her claim on their souls-

 

“Alright. What are your terms?”   
  


“I-”

 

The words caught in her throat for a moment until she registered what it’d offered her.

 

“I want the people that I have loved for as long as I love them to live with me, age as I do and be safe and protected under the terms of my contract.”

 

“For as long as you love them?,” Death rattled, its voice deep and earth-shattering and so, so familiar.

 

She meets his eyes then.

 

“Love is the most enduring out of all of my emotions and I put effort into maintaining it. I can’t fall out of love with them, but I can offer them a way out once immortality tires them:  _ Break the binds that tie us thrice, show me my heart fragile thrice, shame on me, I shall let you be _ .”

 

“Aa,” it agrees, not quite, before it accepts her humanity.

 

“I leave you with a tenth. It has now become more precious. The less you have, the more you want, Little Devil. And you shall awaken with your change, the terms of the contract in place in a new place and a reminder of what you’ve traded away.”

 

She summons her ledger.

 

“Sign here.”

 

It does so, its signature large and grandiose in an ink like dried blood.

 

“It’s a deal.”

The moment she finished her own signature, a sudden tightness locked around her chest and throat, suffocating and cloying as she fell to her knees in agony.

 

Its empty sockets watching her  were the last coherent thought she’d had as light filled her vision and she knew nothing else.


End file.
